


Time After Time

by isaac richard (isaacrichard)



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Canon, fuckin... alcohol. they're drankin, me loudly loving elliot alderson: the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:06:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26521876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaacrichard/pseuds/isaac%20richard
Summary: Happy birthday, Elliot!
Relationships: Darlene Alderson & Elliot Alderson, Elliot Alderson & Mr. Robot
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	Time After Time

**Author's Note:**

> for clarity: takes place just shy of a year after the finale, on elliot's 29th birthday. host elliot ("original" elliot) is the elliot referenced. got it? good
> 
> also lowkey cried the whole time i was writing this i love u elliot happy birthday  
> title from the cyndi lauper song

“You ever think we’d live this long?”

It’s a loaded question, and Darlene’s a little more than intoxicated. He feels as if they’re naughty children, eating cake on the floor of the living room with his favorite movie playing in the background, but no grownup ever comes to reprimand them. He wonders if he’ll ever stop looking over his shoulder, expecting the punishment.

It’s definitely not lost on him that she says “we”, and not _“you”,_ despite it obviously being _his_ periled history she’s referring to. She counts herself as part of their clusterfuck, and that makes sense. It’s because of her that he ever returned to the waking world at all.

And after, in the months and weeks after he was discharged from the hospital – she never went back to being insignificant, neglected in the way she was before. In the way he remembers, finally, as the holes in his memory had mostly healed themselves with time…

Mr. Robot sort of groans, rolls his eyes, effectively cuts off Elliot’s rolling monologue before it can really begin.

He’s sitting opposite them, a plate of cake in his lap, in the big stuffed chair Darlene hauled up from some rich person’s trash. It’s a nice seat, and like Mr. Robot, it sort of belongs with them, grubby though it might have been.

“Don’t look at me,” Mr. Robot mumbles, when Elliot catches his gaze. He stabs at the overly frosted, machine-made sheet cake with his sharp plastic fork. “I can answer that question just as well as you can.”

Which was to say, not at all. Elliot had no idea, and the three beers Darlene had managed to force into him weren’t doing anything in the way of help. This had probably been one of the best birthdays of his life, and all they had done was pop in the movie, drink, and talk about the shit they rarely acknowledged sober.

His instinct is to say “ _no, fuck no.”_ and leave it at that, knowing Darlene will easily take it for an answer. It’s the clearest, the most rational course of action, but he finds the cut and dry negative – “ _Yes, I expected I would have killed myself by now._ ” – feeling like a lie.

“Why did you stay?” he asks Mr. Robot, instead. He’d stuck around the entire day, always in Elliot’s peripheral. The silent observer. “Why are you even here?”

It’s an unfair question, really. Elliot knows Mr. Robot only would have turned up for him.

It had been months since they had truly spoken. Sometimes, it felt like Krista talked to Mr. Robot more than Elliot did. He hadn’t left – a particularly bad panic attack had proved Mr. Robot hadn’t actually gone anywhere – but he wasn’t chaotic, god-like force that he had been before.

Maybe Elliot understood. They weren’t exactly fighting the most dangerous hacker group in the world, anymore. There was a sense of balance within their extremely limited universe – of Elliot, Darlene, and their messy hodgepodge of an apartment. Of the new Betta fish Darlene rescued from a particularly sad-looking shelf at the pet store, lovingly dubbed Azerty. His handsome, clean bowl sat directly in the kitchen window, basking in the sunlight.

“I wanted cake,” Mr. Robot says, shrugging. Elliot frowns, goes to open his mouth –

“You’ve been talking to yourself for too long, kiddo,” Mr. Robot reminds him. “She asked you that question like, five minutes ago.”

Darlene’s looking at them with a pinched, concentrated expression, gaze flickering between Elliot and the empty seat, like she’s trying to see who he’s communicating with. For all she’s spoken with Mr. Robot, she still doesn’t really know he’s the spitting image of Edward Alderson. The clarification would be no one’s idea of a fun conversation.

Even so, Elliot hates that she can do this now – peer into his head this way – but he could hardly deny what was happening. Not anymore.

“What does he have to say?” she mutters, the edge of distaste in her voice obvious. She doesn’t like being upstaged by someone she can’t see.

“He doesn’t know how to answer your question,” Elliot replies, truthful.

He tries, more often than not, to be up front with Darlene. He doesn’t know for sure if she does the same and heavily suspects she doesn’t always. But it was less about her – and more about the honestly itself. Nothing good came from keeping things in the dark.

“Do you?” she asks, after a moment.

Elliot snorts, shovels a final bite of cake in his mouth. It’s sweet, way too sweet, sweet in the way that makes his tastebuds recoil – but he finishes it anyway, mentally reminding himself of her birthday, in November. “No. That’s why I asked him.”

“So – then it’s not a no, then,” Darlene says. She gives him the soft, sad kind of smile that he hates, has always hated. It’s not pity – she can empathize too well for that – but it’s damn close. “I always kinda figured you expected it.”

Elliot gives her a startled look. “Didn’t you?”

She shakes her head. “Not like that. Not like… ooh, the Dark Army could get us, ‘cause they could have, they totally could have. I don’t know. It was like you were holding the door open for death, throwing yourself at it. Running towards it. So, I guess I just assumed you didn’t expect to live for very long.”

“Man, she’s three sheets to the wind,” Mr. Robot hollers. “How much fucking pre-gaming did she _do_?”

Elliot ignores him, even though he knows Darlene had been throwing back shots early in the afternoon. She didn’t have a lot of vices, but she did like to drink.

“People like us die young,” he says. She looks ready to protest, smudged-lipstick lips poised to open, but doesn’t actually say anything.

“C’mon, Darlene, that’s just a fucking fact,” Elliot says. His head swims, but he knows he's right. “Bad family, illegal activities, drugs – it all culminates in death, over and over. I didn’t see a way out because there wasn’t one, not then. The only was out was to survive the statistic.” He pauses, thinking.

He’s not really looking at her, falling back into old eye contact habits, and is grateful she’s too far gone to comment on it. He shift, floor hard under his ass. “I wanted the out. But I couldn’t control the consequences if I took the out.” And he couldn’t accept that reality.

Darlene gently bobbles her head. “It’s a good out,” she mutters. “If you want out. Last resort.”

“There’s a power in ending it yourself,” Mr. Robot agrees. “On your own terms.”

“That just means you gotta make life so you don’t want the out, right?” Elliot laughs at himself, at this conversation. “Right? Isn’t that all it is? Not suffering to the point you don’t want to end it anymore?”

She nods again, sage. “I shouldn’t take vodka shots anymore. It makes me too existential.”

She’s wobbly on her feet when she stands, hauls herself upward. Elliot nearly reaches for her, but she finds her center of gravity before she stumbles. “Happy birthday, kid.”

“I’m older than you,” he points out.

“Yeah, you’re fucking ancient!” Darlene calls, already halfway to her bedroom.

Mr. Robot laughs. “She’s gonna be so goddamn hungover tomorrow,” he says, grinning.

Elliot turns back to him, to the strange apparition of his father, not-his-father. He pulls himself up onto the creaky pleather couch. “You don’t speak to me for months, and now we’re suddenly back to buddy-buddy?”

Mr. Robot makes a face. He hasn’t been looking up, staring fixedly at some spot Elliot can’t see. “It’s your birthday.”

Elliot scoffs, stiffens, crosses his arms. What the fuck? “I’m aware.”

Silence. Elliot looks pointedly at Mr. Robot, who picks uncomfortably at a thread on his jacket.

“I don’t… Don’t they say more the merrier, on birthdays? And shit?” he tries, shrugging in an embarrassed, nearly-frustrated way. “I fucking wanted to see you, kid. Sue me.”

“You _are_ me,” Elliot murmurs. Hadn’t Mr. Robot beaten that into their head a trillion times? “And you don’t need an invitation. I know shit is different now, but – yeah. I’m not trying to ignore your existence, or anything.”

He wouldn’t do that. Not only did he not want to – his gratitude towards Robot ran too deeply.

Robot visibly deflates, whatever tension had him so tightly coiled is gone, dissipated. “I don’t want to ruin this,” he says. “I’ve ruined a lot of shit for you. And I don’t want to ruin this.”

Elliot shrugs. He’s still slightly drunk, and he doesn’t like how sad Mr. Robot looks. “So don’t.”

Mr. Robot makes some kind of scrabbly noise, like there’s a rat caught in his throat. “Not that simple,” he mutters.

Elliot sighs. “Why can’t it be? Why can’t we just… take it easy, for now?”

Robot says nothing to that. He sets what’s left of his plate of cake on their lopsided coffee table. On the screen, _Back to the Future_ has started its credits crawl – Elliot doesn’t remember ever actually bringing his eyes to the television. Not like he didn’t have the plot etched in his mind for life already, or anything.

“I’m gonna turn in,” Elliot murmurs. He’s deduced what’s bothering Mr. Robot by now: he’s afraid of tangling up Elliot’s neat new life. And Elliot doesn’t have a clue on how to make him feel better.

It could happen – the possibility existed that something could cause Mr. Robot to wreck what Elliot’s built, like a bull in a China shop. But there was no way to know, and Elliot couldn’t live his life on maybes.

Elliot thinks about saying something else, something that might neatly wrap up whatever this _was,_ but Mr. Robot beats him to it. He’s risen from his seat, patting at his pockets – and finally seems to find what he’s looking for, after a moment of searching.

Mr. Robot pulls out a sleek black box, like a watch might come in, but much too small. He holds it out to Elliot. “Happy birthday.”

Elliot takes it with gentle fingers. It’s solid in his hands – real. He can’t work out the schematics of Mr. Robot keeping real objects on his person, and he’s a bit too tipsy to try very hard.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” he mutters, turning the box over in his hands. He swallows roughly, fighting back a stupid rush of emotion. Even Darlene hadn’t gotten him a ‘real’ gift, one that you open.

Mr. Robot shrugs. “Yeah, well. This was yours to begin with.”

Before Elliot can ask him just what the hell he means, he’s gone. No flicker, no flash of lightning, no magician’s smoke. Just gone. Elliot wishes he would remember to say goodbye, sometimes, like he used to – when Elliot mind was jelly, right out of the hospital.

It took a long time to fully remember the things Mastermind had done. It took an even longer time to make sense of everything he remembered. Mr. Robot hadn’t ever really not been around for those long months – he hovered for days and weeks on end, like a concerned parent to their sick child.

Once things had evened out – because they did, in time – he had disappeared, just as scared as Elliot had been. Now, it was hard to know when he’d show himself, and when he’d be gone for long stretches of time. It was another challenge of normality – what does a protector do, when the protected finds themselves safe for the foreseeable future?

Elliot didn’t have the answers, but he knew he didn’t want Mr. Robot to leave. He’d been a constant for so long, his absences were felt. Elliot spares a glance to the empty living room, clicks off the TV, and hits the light switch on his way out.

In his own bedroom, sitting on his bed with a frame, Elliot opens the sleek black box. Inside is an old brass key, elegant but rusted, and a slip of creased notebook paper, scrawled over in messing capital letters.

_Thought you might want this back. -MR_

It was key to his childhood bedroom; the one Elliot had hidden so many years ago, cleaned from dirt and dust. Holding it in his hands again feels like holding a curse, an evil spirit, an omen. God knew how Mr. Robot had even gotten his hands on it again.

He turns the key over in his hands, over and over again, before sliding it back into its box. He stares at it for a long time. The key could be blamed for so much of the strife in his life – having it back feels like the power is his, for the first time. A symbol of finally, finally being safe.

A glance at the clock tells him it’s not his birthday anymore.


End file.
